Causes of the Revolution in Nogales

For starters, Alan Knight has found a common factor in all of the social revolutions in Iberoamerica (with the exception of Cuba). A cause that also played a role in the development of the Mexican Revolution for Central Mexico: "a legacy of feudal latifundia, a labor repressive agriculture, as well as the directorship of a land owned oligarchy." Well, here in the North Mexican Border, the same as in Cuba, those weren't the causes of the revolution.

In Nogales, the factors that developed into the revolution were much more "modern," and at the same time the border condition also affected the development of the revolution.

In the first place, there wasn't a prerevolutionary monopolystic structure of the economy in the border. That's why the revolutionaries here didn't use slogans of redistribution of wealth. They used in it´s place personalistic attacks against their enemies, or applied to them the title of "scientific," that is, a follower of the Positivist Doctrines. However, here, it wasn´t an ideologic categorization, but only a way of attacking the loyalties of their oppositors.

What the revolution looked for in the border was to diminish the disparity of incomes, which was determined both racially (Mexicans - Foreigners), as well as geographycally (Central Mexico salaries - Border salaries).

The border worker, the same as in many other parts of Sonora, noticed that his work received a lower pay than the equivalent of foreigners. This was, for instance, one of the main reasons of the Cananea strike of 1906. When William C. Greene, main promoter of Cananea perceived this, he offered the Mexican Vicepresident, Ramon Corral, to raise the salaries of the miners. However Corral answerd that if the would allow that raise, it would bring immediatly a massive immigration from poorer regions of Mexico to the border mines. Therefore, he denied the rise.

Another of the main causes of the Revolution in the border was the improvement in alfabetism created by Porfirism, which also elevated the hope of a better quality of life for the average citizen.

Finally, we must add the influence on the revolution from the poorer members of the prominent families, who didn't see a role for themselves in the leadership of the development of the region. According to Stuart Voss:

The new [revolutionary] politicians were young of modest or limited economic means who previously had found their opportunities either closed or restricted. These poor relatives [of the border notables] seem to have been the mediators through which the family networks adjusted to the new revolutionary realities.

But is wasn´t only them who saw with distrust the foreign penetration. The notables (as Voss calls them) themselves distrust was also fed when they saw that the newest arrivals to Sonora, men who came from Central Mexico and many of them were federal functionaries, immediately got wealthy as they turned into representatives of foreign capital enterprises:

The [Sonoran and Nogales notable] families changed into opposition against Diaz, having concluded that the Foreigners had penetrated the regional economy in an unacceptable degree... They even doubted that the Porfirian regine would be able to guarantee to them economic success.

That's why we can say that the revolution in the border is a claim made by a new urban class of Sonorenses or Nogalenses seeking better life conditions, in which the leaders will be those who belonged to the old Sonoran families that had the bad luck of having been born dispossessed or inheritors of the concept of what is forbidden in this region: ilegitimacy.

On the other side, we cannot see their participation in the armed conflict as a new social class trying to remove the old one. If this were the case, we would have that the revolution had among it's accomplishments the removal of the old family networks.

However, this didn´t happen. The revolutionaries are themselves members of these family networks, so the revolutionary movement will have in Sonora a family ingredient that hasn´t been studied yet: Plutarco Elias Calles is a relative of Maytorena himself, while his father, Plutarco Elias Lucero, is first cousin to Virginia Gaxiola Lucero (married to Alberto Barnett Sanchez, from La Arizona), and another of his sisters in law was the wife of a brother of Luis Martinez, one of the richest men in Guaymas. Then, his brother in law, Fernando Chacon also married to another Barnett, while among the opposite side, Maytorena himself, besides being relative to Plutarco Elias, is also related to the Nogales notables, as we already saw.

What the revolution accomplishes in the border, however, is to block the future development of the Nogales elite. This is something that doesn't happen in any other sonoran place, where the elite is kept.

In Nogales, some of the notable families suffer the impoundment of their wealth, or are affected in different degrees by the revolution. Others will go to Mexico City and will participate in the National revolutionary Government. Such is the case, for instance, of the Mascareñas. First, Elias Calles impounds their possessions, although when the Bank of Mexico is established, Alberto Mascareñas is named by Calles himself, in 1925, as it´s first Director.

The local consequenses of this dispersion and weakening of the porfirian Nogales elite are, first the weakening of the prerevolutionary local economic order (the Nogales elite is needed in the building of a new postrevolutionary Mexico). And second, a particular way in which the building of a new postrevolutionary order in Nogales will take place (this process will be covered at it´s time in this work).